Migrating to Microsoft Teams

Challenge

Accenture has invested heavily in empowering our mobile workforce of 477,000 people with digital capabilities to work in the New and lead epic disruption for clients. Collaboration, in particular, is enabled company-wide by such tools as Microsoft Office 365, Windows 10, OneDrive for Business and now, Microsoft Teams. For Accenture, migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams offered us the advantages of taking collaboration to the team level and much more.

Share

Strategy and solution

Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered collaboration platform that brings together collections of people, content and tools to get things done. When Microsoft concepted the idea, our internal IT organization was involved in collaborating on the early technical preview, providing input on the types of use cases relevant in a large, multinational enterprise and the requirements needed for enterprise scale and security. Accenture also participated in the early product pilot, along with other key Microsoft beta customers and partners, to provide input—while also pushing the envelope with Microsoft on Teams’ capabilities.

When Teams went live, we continued piloting and adopting the product as a secondary, supplemental tool. Favorable aspects included integration with Microsoft Office, cloud file storage built on SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, and mobile connectivity. Our internal IT organization chose an organic adoption approach for using Teams while the product continued maturing. For the first year, download and use was primarily word of mouth with a light promotional campaign aimed at generating buzz and general awareness.

During this time, our internal IT organization had been preparing for full migration to Microsoft Teams. A project team worked with Microsoft to prepare Accenture’s environment and features required. As a company that leads in the New, Accenture’s approach with Teams is to push the envelope to use Teams while continuing to work with Microsoft to mature the product and prepare migration steps. Accenture people were being empowered—and encouraged—to use Teams if they desired, with many caveats around the newness of the tool and that enabling Accenture’s network for an optimal experience was a work in progress.

A year into deployment, internal IT is beginning to push the Teams client to Accenture users’ PCs. This stage will transition Accenture from organic growth to large-scale access and adoption. Building on earlier successes, two additional business pilots are planned with an increasing number of users. The pilots will enable the IT team to evaluate the deployment of the network, reporting from Microsoft, and the readiness of the migration tools. Additionally, the pilots will help identify the end-user experience implications and key resistance areas that will ultimately shape the change enablement approach for velocity migrations.

Teams presents a different way of working, driving the need for a rigorous change and adoption program. Awareness is being raised through a multi-stage adoption campaign disseminated through multiple media and channels. Once all Accenture users have successfully migrated to Teams, a plan for decommissioning Skype for Business will play out.

Transformation

The deployment of Teams is a strong partnership between Accenture and Microsoft, a reflection of two long-time industry leaders and relationship partners. Given that Microsoft Teams is woven into the Office 365 fabric, it brings a familiar platform into the Accenture’s workplace—borrowing from consumer trends around conversational interfaces and persistent chat applications. Mid-way through the journey, we have 350,000 users in Teams, with nearly 120,000 active teams.

Microsoft Teams is redefining how Accenture teams work together. It is becoming the new “digital cockpit” for employees, providing a more user-centric approach and a new generation of technology for communicating, chatting, file sharing, conferencing and more. Accenture is on the path to company-wide implementation and adoption with current features and looks forward to adopting future features that will continue to evolve the Teams experience.